Found Buried
Deep in the Archives
ETAN's team of crack researchers found
this "thank you postcard" buried deep in
the archives in the back of a file
cabinet. Indonesia thanks the World Bank
for its support of Suharto's murderous
regime.
Graphic from Oscar-nominated documentary
THE ACT OF KILLING
from "Criminal
Debt" by Jeffrey A. Winters in
Reinventing the World Bank, edited
by Jonathan R. Pincus & Jeffrey A.
Winters
Over the course of the New Order, the
Bank loaned Indonesia almost $30
billion. The best estimate of theft
rates in Indonesian projects is
one-third of the loan value. Thus
Indonesia's criminal debt linked to
World Bank sources is roughly $10
billion. During the military
dictatorship of Suharto, Indonesian
citizens were extremely limited in their
abilities to expose and stop corruption
by government officials and Suharto
cronies. The same cannot be said for the
Bank. If it had been committed to
fulfilling its fiduciary mandate in
Article III, it could have raised the
corruption problem as a matter that by
law the Bank was mandated to address. It
could have taken a variety of measures,
including intensifying the supervision
of its projects, thereby reducing the
levels of corruption in its own
operations, even if it could not stop
the rampant corruption across the
government. It could have threatened
gradually to reduce its lending to
Indonesia over a period of years if the
leakage of Bank project funds was not
progressively curtailed. And as a last
resort, it could have halted lending
completely or1 the grou~lds that
continued lending under circumstances of
persistently high Ie\rels of theft was
incompatible with the Bank's Articles of
Agreement.The Bank did none of these
things.
About East Timor and Indonesian
Action Network
The East Timor and
Indonesia Action Network (ETAN)
advocates for democracy, justice and
human rights for Timor-Leste, West Papua
and Indonesia. In 2012, the government
of the Democratic Republic Timor-Leste
awarded ETAN the Order of Timor (Ordem
Timor) for its role in the liberation of
the country. More information about ETAN
can be found at:
http://www.etan.org
